The “Wake Up in the Sky” rapper, who has had an ice cream cone inked on his right cheek since 2011, was recently asked if he would take credit for starting the trend of rappers having face tattoos.
“I wouldn’t take credit for starting the trend, but I think I definitely made people think it was something cool to do,” he said in an interview with “The Morning Hustle.” “I was going through something when I did it. If I could do it over again, I probably wouldn’t have did it.”
If that sounds like regret, you’re mishearing. Mane said he didn’t “regret it at all.” He continued, “People don’t know the backstory to that. I wasn’t in a healthy place at the time. That was just a sporadic thing I did.”
Mane did talk about some of the other non-tattoo regrets he’d had in life.
“There’s a couple things I regret doing that I see people think I think is cool, some things I said or did … disrespected people and I’m like, ‘Damn.’ I look back on that now that I’m mature and I look down like this s— ain’t even … I wouldn’t handle it like that.”
In 2014, Mane pleaded guilty to a charge of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. He was released from prison in 2016.
In an interview with Malcolm Gladwell, Mane said that going to prison “100%” saved his life. “I was outta control,” he told Gladwell in 2017. “I wouldn’t want to do it over, but in hindsight it helped me.”
The “I Get the Bag” artist opened up about what had kept him on the straight and narrow since his release.
“Just focusing on … the job, my freedom, my family, and knowing it could be taken away from me,” he told the “Morning Hustle.” “It ain’t too far removed from my mind sitting in the cell, and how nasty it was. You know I don’t want to go back.”
Just as his ice cream tattoo is a constant reminder of where his mind was in that one moment in 2011, Mane wants his new album, “Breath of Fresh Air,” to reflect his current mental state.
“I wanted to put out an album to be a time capsule of where I’m at in my life right now, so I can look back at it 10 years from now,” he told Streetz Atlanta.
“I was like, ‘This gonna be the discography of Gucci in 2023. … So now when I look back 10 years from now, I say, ‘OK, this where I was at.’”